Darkest Suburbia...and Beyond!

[mirrored from my Webspace at www.lonepenman.net:]

NOTE: In the interests of protecting the privacy of the individuals and institutions involved, I’ve changed the names and a couple of personally identifying details in the following account. The story, however, unfolded exactly as described.

# # #

A neighbor of mine here in Darkest Suburbia walked up to his apartment door late one afternoon this past week to find a cheery little yellow flowered gift bag on his doorstep. Inside were (a) a box of six snickerdoodle cookies (his mother’s favorite), (b) a box of orange spice tea bags (ditto), and (c) a handwritten note, reading as follows:

Scott,
I thought your mom would enjoy these treats. 🙂  Thanks again for your time last week.
— Dani

A friendly, thoughtful gesture? Well, possibly…

…except that Dani has never met Scott’s mother. Dani works for a local senior living community which offers memory care, and Scott has been busy for the past couple of weeks touring a number of memory care institutions. He’s looking for a suitable facility for his mother, Adele, who has been diagnosed with dementia and now needs more specialized living arrangements than her current caregivers are able to provide. It isn’t practical for Adele to come and go on these scouting visits, so Scott has been doing this on his own.

Now as it happens, there was also a phone message from Dani on Scott’s answering machine:

Hi, Scott, this is Dani from Northmont at Bonny Slope; I just wanted to let you know that I was running some errands and I dropped off a treat for your mom at your apartment — I’m sorry I missed you. It’s in a yellow gift bag and I’m sure she’ll enjoy it.

The stinger here is not that Dani knew Adele’s tastes in cookies and tea; that came up in the conversation she and Scott had while he was touring the Northmont complex. Similar conversations had happened on all of Scott’s tours, though he recalls the one with Dani as a little more probing. No, the salient details are that Scott’s home is several miles away from the Northmont in an unlikely direction for errand-running…and the cookies came not from the upscale supermarket bakery just down the road from Scott’s place, but from the one just across the street from the Northmont. Scott was also a little surprised at the timing of the gift; he had taken a more conventional follow-up phone call from Dani a day or so earlier, and had let her know at that time that he was at least a week away from making a decision. The inevitable conclusion is that the “gift” is more marketing tactic than act of spontaneous generosity.

What’s more difficult to decide is whether the gesture is merely awkward or outright stalker-ish. Scott can’t simply hand over the gift to Adele, who has no context for — and limited ability to understand — why a total stranger would send her cookies and tea. (It’s also worth noting that some memory care patients need supervision where eating is concerned, so that any gift of food is potentially problematic.) Accepting and presenting the treats as his own is, if not strictly dishonest, at least a little disconcerting. And where complimentary goodies are usually perfectly good marketing tools, most of the time they’re usually presented as just that — not as a gift to someone not yet involved in the sales conversation.

For my part, I sincerely doubt that Dani’s intentions were anything but benign. But in the circumstances, it’s clear that her arrival on Scott’s doorstep was more purposeful than spontaneous. And that makes it much too easy for her gesture to be misread as genuinely creepy rather than professionally over-eager. It’s an error in judgment that does the Northmont no favors as Scott ponders the best facility for his mother, and an oddly aggressive marketing tactic in an industry where demand is high enough that many facilities often have long waiting lists.

Indeed, Scott reports that he’s more or less taken the Northmont off his list for reasons mostly unrelated to the gift drop-off. But that’s left him with a new problem: now what’s he supposed to do with the cookies and tea?

I may just volunteer to eat the evidence.

I saw The Avengers Friday -- amazingly, there was not a line round the block for the early show at the Cinemagic -- and have been perusing reactions to the film online thereafter.  Myself, I quite liked the movie; I think it does about as well as one can at the "epic superhero teamup" genre, and there are lots of nifty character moments.  But I came across an interesting thread in other people's reviews that made me think about the way Big Action Movies are filmed nowadays, and so what I want to do here is explain why I think Joss Whedon's work in this film outdoes two of the other milestones in recent Big Action Movie history.

What sparked this thought were two different reactions to Whedon's directing of the epic action sequences: one writer thought they were too fast and not focused enough, and the other thought they were just a touch too slow and too narrowly targeted.  I think they're both wrong; to my mind, Whedon's action sequences -- and most especially the long battle in Manhattan that takes up most of the last third of the movie -- do exactly what they should, and that Whedon knew exactly what he was doing as he designed them.

To illustrate my point, let me cite an exchange near the end of the battle (I promise, this isn't any sort of serious spoiler).  Captain America and Thor have just finished off a wave of the invading forces, and while they've acquitted themselves well, they're clearly both a bit worse for wear at this point.  And then another wave of invaders swoops into view, Thor looks at Cap, and says "Ready for another round?" or words to that effect.  And Cap nods -- but they're both obviously tired, and not really ready for yet another wave, and they know that barring a miracle, this may just be the end of the line.  And then, of course, they wade into that next wave....

And the moment works, and works brilliantly.  Why?  Because we viewers have just been through the same epic battle the heroes have, and even though we're eager to get back into action, we too are emotionally (and just a little physically) tired after all we've seen, and there's only so much we can take before battle fatigue sets in.  Whedon, in a ten or fifteen second exchange between these two characters, has demonstrated that he's exactly synchronized his characters' capacity for heroic action with his viewers' ability to assimilate that action.  We know how drained Cap and Thor are because we're drained too; we've had the same experience in the theater that they've had in Marvelverse Manhattan.

Which is why, for me, The Avengers works better as a Big Action Movie than either of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight or Guy Ritchie's 2009 Sherlock Holmes.  Both of these are, in their way, well-made movies with much good in them -- but I dislike the way their action sequences unfold; where Whedon's action serves his storytelling, both Nolan and Ritchie seem to me to superimpose Big Action Scenes on their movies in ways that get in the way of the story rather than reinforcing it.  The action in Dark Knight seems largely gratuitous to me, basically designed to put roadblocks in the way of the character conflict between Batman and the Joker -- in particular, the movie needs those gratuitous action sequences so that one doesn't look too closely at the plot logic leading up to the climax.  Sherlock Holmes has a somewhat different problem; the "rewind" effect Ritchie uses to illustrate Holmes' thought processes is intriguing, but the combination of that technique and the extremely fast cuts and scene shifts of that film's action scenes (both inside and outside the "rewinds") make the viewer work too hard to process them.  So rather than actually getting inside Holmes' head, we more or less get to see that Holmes has Amazing Intellectual Superpowers but not much else.

By contrast, the action sequences in The Avengers work because they give viewers a viable entry point into the action, both on the macro level (as noted above) and on the individual level (see especially two of the Black Widow's scenes and two of the Hulk's).  The scenes work because they're paced in a way that lets viewers experience the story side-by-side with the characters.  Here, the spectacle serves the story rather than simply being flashy and, well, spectacular.  Not that it isn't spectacular when it needs to be, mind, but for once in the Big Action niche we've got a movie in which the craftsmanship is well matched with the material.  One can disagree with some of the film's creative choices, but for pure technical craft, I give Joss Whedon the highest possible marks.